f physical
want? What are the temptations of the rich to those of the poor? Yet see
how lenient we are to the crimes of the one,--how relentless to those of
the other! It is a bad world; it makes a man's heart sick to look around
him. The consciousness of how little individual genius can do to relieve
the mass, grinds out, as with a stone, all that is generous in ambition;
and to aspire from the level of life is but to be more graspingly
selfish."

"Can legislators, or the moralists that instruct legislators, do so
little, then, towards universal good?" said Lester, doubtingly.

"Why? what can they do but forward civilization? And what is
civilization, but an increase of human disparities? The more the luxury
of the few, the more startling the wants, and the more galling the
sense, of poverty. Even the dreams of the philanthropist only tend
towards equality; and where is equality to be found, but in the state
of the savage? No; I thought otherwise once; but I now regard the
vast lazar-house around us without hope of relief:--Death is the sole
Physician!"

"Ah, no!" said the high-souled Madeline, eagerly; "do not take away from
us the best feeling and the highest desire we can cherish. How poor,
even in this beautiful world, with the warm sun and fresh air about us,
that alone are sufficient to make us glad, would be life, if we could
not make the happiness of others!"

Aram looked at the beautiful speaker with a soft and half-mournful
smile. There is one very peculiar pleasure that we feel as we grow
older,--it is to see embodied in another and a more lovely shape the
thoughts and sentiments we once nursed ourselves; it is as if we viewed
before us the incarnation of our own youth; and it is no wonder that we
are warmed towards the object, that thus seems the living apparition
of all that was brightest in ourselves! It was with this sentiment
that Aram now gazed on Madeline. She felt the gaze, and her heart beat
delightedly, but she sunk at once into a silence, which she did not
break during the rest of their walk.

"I do not say," said Aram, after a pause, "that we are not able to make
the happiness of those immediately around us. I speak only of what
we can effect for the mass. And it is a deadening thought to mental
ambition, that the circle of happiness we can create is formed more by
our moral than our mental qualities. A warm heart, though accompanied
but by a mediocre understanding, is even more likely to p